The latest Department of Home Affairs data shows that China is dominating international student enrolments, with 81,600 Chinese student visa holders in Australia as at 31 December 2018:
Alongside this growth in Chinese international students has come increased reports of cheating across Australia’s universities.
For example, in 2014 Chinese students were embroiled in a widespread ghost-writing scandal of whom whistleblowing academics described as “functionally illiterate“.
And earlier this month, The ABC reported that Chinese students were engaging in ghost-writing services en masse:
International students and academics the ABC spoke to described the proliferation of ghostwriting advertisements on social media platforms including WeChat and Facebook, university notice boards and even on the back of restroom doors at universities…
Tracey Bretag, an associate professor at the University of South Australia, said the services were also infiltrating university email inboxes, adding that Chinese international students were particularly vulnerable…
“Our Chinese students told me that sometimes three times a day they get advertising about [these] commercial sites,” she told the ABC…
While some cashed-up international students pay others to write their essays because they can, experts say others do it because they feel pressured to pass their courses.
It seems cheating and plagiarism by Chinese international students is a global phenomenon.
Across the pond in New Zealand, Chinese students have for a long time been front-and-centre of cheating at universities. In 2013, an investigation uncovered a well-organised commercial cheating service for Chinese-speaking students that paid tutors for original assignments.
And last month, the University of Auckland was embroiled in its own ghostwriting scandal, with a whistleblowing university academic claiming that half of the international students in their class were cheating.
The story is similar in the United States, where a Chinese cheating ring at UCLA was recently uncovered, which follows a raft of cheating scandals involving Chinese students:
According to prosecutors, Cai, along with four current and former UCLA students and another student at Cal State Fullerton, helped at least 40 Chinese nationals obtain student visas by fraudulently taking the TOEFL, an English proficiency exam, on their behalf. Cai’s ringers would show up to testing sites with fake Chinese passports bearing their own photos but with the names of the clients…
In 2018 a professor at UC Santa Barbara told the Los Angeles Times that Chinese students comprise 6 percent of the student body but account for a third of plagiarism cases…
In 2016 Reuters reported that the University of Iowa was investigating at least 30 students—most, if not all, believed to be Chinese—over allegations of cheating. In 2015 federal prosecutors in Pennsylvania indicted 15 Chinese nationals for a standardized test-taking scheme similar to the UCLA case…
As supply follows demand, an entire industry has sprouted to help Chinese college applicants and students cheat. A Google search yields countless websites offering substitute test-taking services for the SAT, ACT, GRE, and TOEFL…
Given domestic students have similar access to cheating services, why do Chinese exploit these services much more? The answer is likely cultural, as suggested by the New York Times:
In China, academic journals are riddled with plagiarism. A professor in China tells National Public Radio that about 30 percent of submissions to the Journal of Zhejiang University-Science was drawn from heavily plagiarized research.
In China, rip-offs of all sorts are common… Yet copying, whether a painting or a literary work, has a long tradition in China. It was a way of learning, of showing admiration and respect…
Whatever the reason, cheating at Australia’s universities must be stomped out and the perpetrators punished severely. Enough’s enough.
